Do Campaign Donors Influence Polarization? Evidence from Public Financing in the American States

Harden, Jeffrey J.; Kirkland, Justin H.

doi:10.1111/lsq.12108

Cited by 16 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 49 publications

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“… The state legislative position‐taking literature offers a number of key variables that provide voting cues for legislators, including the preference of fellow legislators, constituents, party affiliation, party leadership, interest groups, staff, personal reading, values, committee reports, executive branch, and so forth that vary in importance and effect (Ray, ; Songer et al, ). More recently, a wide variety of factors including campaign finances (Harden & Kirkland, ; Roscoe & Jenkins, ), public election funding (Masket & Miller, ), information sources (Mooney, ), and issue salience (Jenkins, ) have been explored. Our study extends this body of work to include bill frames as another variable affecting legislative vote choice.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Framed for Compromise? The Role of Bill Framing in State Legislative Behavior on Natural Gas Policy

Kalaf-Hughes¹,

Kear²

2017

Policy Studies Journal

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State legislative decision making on natural gas policy has become a balancing act, as legislators are forced to grapple with tensions between economically beneficial policies and environmental impacts. Despite increased public attention to the benefits and costs related to hydraulic fracturing, there has been little scholarly attention paid to how policy framing affects legislator behavior on this issue. We analyze recorded votes on bills relating to natural gas policy in Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico between 1999 and 2008; a time period spanning the recent boom. Using a novel database of bill frames, we create a ratio measure that accounts for the proportion of environmental to economic arguments within each piece of legislation. We find status quo–challenging, anti‐development policies can receive bipartisan support, as long as economic frames balance or are greater than environmental frames. Framing natural gas as a win‐win scenario where economic benefit and environmental protection can be achieved simultaneously is an effective legislative strategy. Using the case of natural gas policy, this study demonstrates bill framing substantively affects state legislator vote choice and implies bipartisan compromise is possible given the right balance of frames.

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confidence: 99%

Framed for Compromise? The Role of Bill Framing in State Legislative Behavior on Natural Gas Policy

Kalaf-Hughes¹,

Kear²

2017

Policy Studies Journal

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“…On the other side, Masket and Miller (2014) look at the voting records of individual legislators in Maine and Arizona and find that individual legislators who take public financing are no more extreme than those that do not. Similarly, Harden and Kirkland (2016) find no individual differences in legislative behavior among three legislators in New Jersey or the aggregate behavior of the Arizona and Maine legislatures using synthetic controls.…”

Section: How Public Financing Programs Affect Candidate Positioningmentioning

confidence: 98%

Public Money Talks Too: How Public Campaign Financing Degrades Representation

Kilborn

Vishwanath

2021

American J Political Sci

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Does public campaign financing improve representation by reducing politicians' reliance on wealthy donors as advocates claim, or does it worsen representation by expanding the candidate marketplace to give extreme and nonrepresentative candidates an electoral boost? We conduct a novel analysis of public financing programs in Arizona, Connecticut, and Maine to causally identify the effect of a legislator's funding status on how closely she represents constituent preferences. Using multiple identification strategies, we show that candidates who exclusively use public campaign financing are more extreme and less representative of their districts than nonpublicly financed candidates. Our findings add new evidence to the electoral reform debate by demonstrating how replacing private campaign donations with public financing can actually damage substantive representation. We also advance the scholarship on how institutions affect substantive representation and candidate positioning as they respond to new campaign financing structures.

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“…Scholars disagree about whether small-money political donating is polarizing and (if it is polarizing) what exactly this polarization consists of, and why it occurs (Culberson, McDonald, and Robbins 2019;Keena andKnight-Finley 2019, Harden andKirkland 2016). It is also not clear whether small-money political donating is more polarizing than non-monetary forms of political action such as protesting, whether small-money political donating outside of electoral politics contributes to polarization, and whether the anti-democratic effects of big-money donations are normatively worse than the polarizing effects of small money donations.…”

Section: Limitations Of Small-money Political Donatingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Small Money Donating as Democratic Politics

Rubenstein¹

2021

Perspect. polit.

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Since 2008, the number of people in the United States making small monetary donations to political causes, both within and beyond electoral politics, has skyrocketed. While critics of “big money” in politics laud these donations because they are small, proponents of small-scale democratic political action eye them suspiciously because they are monetary. Neither group interrogates whether the monetariness of these donations might be a source of their democratic potential. Building on Wendy Brown’s conceptual distinction between monetization and economization, I argue that small-money political donations are potentially democratic not only because they are small, but also because they are monetary. More specifically, the mobility, divisibility, commensurability, and fungibility of money help make small-money political donations potentially democratic, by making them potentially accessible, non-intrusive, and collective. Money is the coin of the economic realm, but it can also be a currency of democratic politics.

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Do Campaign Donors Influence Polarization? Evidence from Public Financing in the American States

Cited by 16 publications

References 49 publications

Framed for Compromise? The Role of Bill Framing in State Legislative Behavior on Natural Gas Policy

Framed for Compromise? The Role of Bill Framing in State Legislative Behavior on Natural Gas Policy

Public Money Talks Too: How Public Campaign Financing Degrades Representation

Small Money Donating as Democratic Politics

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